Browsing Posts tagged John Jay report

What on Earth is Going on with the Catholic Church?

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The Flip Side of Mercy

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Scandals and Sinners are Not New

Scandals and sinners in the Catholic Church are not new.
Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus Christ was a pretty big deal, and he was chosen personally by Jesus Christ to be among the first 12 Bishops of His Church.
So it is not surprising that members of the Church hierarchy can commit sins.
Nobody denies that..

The Current Pedophilia and Coverup Scandals

Recent news headlines in 2018 show that there continue to be horrific evil sins and crimes being committed by some clergy in the Catholic Church.
Enemies of the Catholic Church, who resent the Church’s moral authority, who do not want to follow Judeo-Christian commandments, and who have been attacking the Church for 2000 years, are very quick to point out sins committed by members of the Church.

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And the mud really sticks.o
The National Review correctly points out that such depraved sacrilegious acts by even ONE priest damage the moral authority and credibility of the Catholic Church:

“This is why, when sex scandals within the Church come to light, observations that the “vast majority” of clergy did nothing wrong strike many as unmoving. If, as Catholics maintain, the Church’s hierarchy derives its legitimacy from a transmission of spiritual authority passed down from the Apostles, then even isolated instances of malfeasance within that hierarchy can shake people’s faith in this claim.”

This is also why so many good Catholic Clergy, including Archbishop Vigano and Madison’s Bishop Morlino, are calling for complete transparency and accountability throughout the Church, all the way up to our Pope.

Being Balanced and Fair to the Catholic Clergy

Those of us Catholics who love our Church do not enjoy watching the vast innocent remainder of our beloved holy priests demonized and attacked publicly by hate-filled progressive media. The media misrepresent our Catholic clergy in most unfair terms.

We realize that saying “but your Honor, the other guy over there committed many more crimes than I did” is never a good defense.

But we also realize that truth is valuable, honor must be defended, and institutions and principles stand, even when some officials betray them.
The Presidency of the the United States was not abandoned when one man got caught desecrating the Oval Office with his sexual sins and depravity.
And all the members of one race are not condemned when one member of that race commits a crime.
Bigotry and prejudice are bigotry and prejudice, even when they are directed at the Catholic clergy, as opposed to a (temporarily) more politically popular group.

In that spirit, we digress to put the magnitude of the problem into perspective, before we continue to discuss the latest Catholic Church sex abuse problem, it’s shocking implications, and possible solutions.

RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), our nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, reports that of the annual 63,000 sexual abuse cases substantiated by Child Protective Services, the perpetrator was most often the parent (80%). Other relatives were responsible for 6%, 4% were unmarried partners of a parent, and 5% were “other,” (from siblings to strangers, and this category would include all clergy religious of all denominations).

The findings of the John Jay report are Facts are backed up by independent sources like Psychology Today, Newsweek, National Review and insurance companies who calculate risk (and charge litigation insurance premiums accordingly) for religious and other institutions. Catholic institutions are not charged any larger insurance premiums than any other group.

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Despite the dramatic reduction in Church scandals shown in the above graph, and despite the fact that the above graph represents only a very small fraction of the total sexual abuse of children in the United States, those in the media who resent the traditional Judeo-Christian teachings which the Catholic Church has maintained for 2000 years, continue to dredge up and attack the church for crimes and sins which occurred between 1950 and 2000.

Magnitude of Our Whole Society’s Problem

The message we should take from the above statistics is not that abuse in the Catholic Church is not too bad, but that there is a SHOCKING level of sexual abuse of children throughout all of our society, including abuse by teachers, and ABUSE BY PARENTS, that has been off the radar all this time. Most of us don’t know about it, and the media has not told us. The numbers are sometimes sketchy and can vary from study to study, but the general picture that emerges is very worrisome and shocking. The National Center for Victims of Crime tells us that 28% of US kids are sexually victimized during their formative years.

Yes, 28% of US kids are sexually victimized during their formative years.

Back to the Catholic Church

Despite the fact that the Catholic clergy actually have the lowest frequency of child abuse of any group on earth, despite the fact that Catholic Church abuse has now been dramatically reduced, and despite the fact that the Catholic Church has formulated model abuse prevention programs whose implementation should be considered by all other institutions in our society, the Catholic Church is still making headlines recently regarding sex abuse scandals.

And this time, we cannot just blame the media, which likes to pick on the Catholic Church.
Most recently, some new facts have emerged which challenge even the most faithful members of the Catholic Church.

The Unexpected and Shocking Developments

The new facts to surface regarding the old Catholic Church scandals do not involve frequency of incidence, which seems to have been dramatically reduced, but they involve two aspects of the old coverups which cannot be ignored:

The Church is now being accused of coverup, as high up as Pope Francis.

The detailed nature of the sexual abuse has been identified — and it is almost exclusively homosexual.

The picture now emerging is one not of pedophilia, but of homosexual abuse of older male children and seminarians by homosexual priests.
These developments create a clash of values in our modern culture that will have no easy resolution.

Clash of Values
First, the Events of Summer 2018

Pope Francis greets Archbishop McCarrick

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Three major new events have brought us to this point of scandal in the Catholic Church this summer.

Cardinal McCarrick, one of Pope Francis’ closest advisors, resigned from the College of Cardinals following allegations of sexual abuse of a teenage boy 40 years ago in New York City, as well as sexual misconduct with seminarians over an extended more recent period of time.

Then, Archbishop Vigano, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, issued an 11 page letter implicating Pope Francis and several senior prelates in covering up Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s alleged sexual abuse of a youth and of seminarians. He claimed that Pope Francis knew about strict canonical sanctions imposed on McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 but chose to repeal them. He accused Pope Francis of not only ignoring Pope Benedict’s sanctions, but also of promoting Cardinal McCarrick to be the Pope’s trusted counselor. Archbishop Vigano claimed that he personally spoke with Pope Francis about the gravity of McCarrick’s abuses soon after the Pope’s election in 2013. These allegations have not yet been verified.

Is the Catholic Church Abuse Homosexual in Nature?

There is now much debate on whether the abuse occurring in the Catholic Church is homosexual in nature.
And there are many claims on both sides.
This blogger believes that the statistics speak for themselves, but below is some of the evidence pro and con.

Although the majority of abuses involve older youth, our society is more shocked by cases involving young children. This issue is complicated by the fact that in the past the term “pedophilia” was used broadly and included activity with teenagers.
For example, sexual activity with 16 year old children is not actually categorized as pedophilia, but as ephebophilia — which is not categorized as a mental disorder, nor is it illegal in many places such as Washington D.C., where the age of consent for sexual activity is 16.

This information, the fact that the bulk of what has been called child sex abuse in the Church turns out to be homosexual ephebophilia, has implications both on possible solutions to the Church’s “pedophilia” problems, and on the clear fact that there are, albeit against Church regulations, homosexual priests in the Catholic Church.
Not only are there homosexual priests, a fact which was not unknown, but those homosexual priests seem to have an elevated tendency to engage in sexual activity, and to engage in sexual activity with youth.

An NIH (National Institutes of Health) NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) PubMed.gov Resources J. Sex Marital Therapy article finds that the “proportion of true pedophiles among persons with a homosexual erotic development is greater than that in persons who develop heterosexually.”

Santa Cruz University psychologist Dr. Thomas Plante’s argues that homosexuality is NOT associated with pedophilia. Dr. Plante says that clerical offenders tend to be “generalists” who do not necessarily prefer boys, but who turn to boys because they have trust with and access to boys, which they do not have with girls. Arguments such as this one are not intuitive to most of us, particularly given the statistics and the observations made by people who live in proximity to the gay culture, like the author of Madison’s Capital Times guest column, Can Madison tolerate Catholics? Dr.Plante does acknowledge that most abusive priests are not pedophiles, since pedophiles are attracted to young, prepubescent children, generally under the age of 11. He does not discuss specifically whether homosexuals could be inclined toward ephebophilia.

Explosive Implications

This association between homosexuality in the priesthood and forbidden sexual activity with teenagers (previously labeled pedophilia, but more correctly called ephebophilia) is the explosive information the Church has been faced with since the publication of the John Jay report around 2010. This is information that, in the present global gay rights and gay marriage atmosphere, is not something anybody knows how to present to the world. The political incorrectness of this information, and the potential for backlash following its acknowledgment, does not need much elaboration.

If these two issues are actually linked, that is, if homosexual priests are more inclined towards pedophilia (or, more accurately, ephobophilia, attraction to post-pubescent young men) than are heterosexual priests, then the solution to the pedophilia problem would have to involve a renewed effort to exclude homosexuals from the priesthood, and involve better enforcement of Church policy not to ordain homosexual men.

Nobody needs this blogger to tell them how politically unpopular trying to eliminate any homosexual sub-culture from the Church would be today in 2018. Since that action is needed to eliminate the 80-90% of sexual activity which is frequently called “pedophilia,” but which is actually ephebophilia, we need clergy of great courage to speak the truth and to name the problem.

Surprisingly, there was also a thought-provoking and supportive guest column entitiled Can Madison tolerate Catholics? in the Capital Times by non-Christian, non-Catholic Arabist-Islamologist scholar Kevin Barrett, which pointed out his first hand experience observing the association of homosexuality and ephebophilia in California.

What’s a Liberal to Do?

Liberal Catholics, and our liberal Pope, who are inclined to relax Catholic rules on divorce and remarriage, are faced with a serious inconsistency.

If indeed, homosexuality is linked with ephebophilia, as all the Catholic abuse statistics indicate (science is real) then supporting homosexuals in the priesthood becomes incompatible with elimination of 80-90% of the sexual activity which has been called “pedophilia” in the Church today.

If the Pope was trying to show tolerance, mercy and compassion to the “Lavender Mafia” (gay priests who defy Church teaching on homosexual activity), that has now become unintentionally synonymous with coverup of the old child abuse scandals.

Now liberals in the Church who want to “modernize” the Church have come up against a wall — do you support the homosexual agenda with mercy and compassion, or do you side compassionately with justice for the victims of sexual abuse.

The Flip Side of Mercy

And so we now face the fact that there is a balance between mercy and justice, between compassion for the sinner and compassion for the victim, and there are times when we cannot be on both sides of the fence.

Despite our poor human lack of understanding of why justice must be enforced and sins must be atoned for, that balance does exist, and is as sure as the laws of physics and gravity.

As Catholics, both Catholics in the pews and clergy, many of us have trapped ourselves unwittingly, as we tried so hard to accommodate the cultural values around us, and to understand and excuse the behavior the sexual revolution of the 1960’s has spawned. We have tried to normalize, accept, and sometimes even welcome the homosexual culture into the Catholic Church. This has been a source of much conflict within the Catholic Church.

Now it turns out that welcoming and tolerating homosexuality, particularly into the priesthhod, brings with it some painful baggage that none of us ever expected– heart-rending injury to our youth.

We cannot rage for justice from our leadership, condemning them for coverups, while we are also the ones who raged for normalization of homosexuality. Liberal Catholics are now caught between a rock and a hard place. They cannot be on both sides of the fence. There is often an unrealized cost to mercy, a cost that nobody knew would have to be paid.

Mercy only allows us to offer ourselves as compensation for wrongs which have been done. We cannot submit other people to suffering, especially children, in the name of mercy.

In the most recent scandal, Pope Francis is trapped between his open and welcoming attitude towards gay priests like McCarrick, and the shocking realization that these homosexual priests, often referred to as the “lavender mafia”, live a culture often associated with promiscuity, ephebophilia, and cover up.

The pope and the Church are damned by our society if they don’t welcome and condone homosexual behavior, and they are damned in more ways than one if they do.

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Where Do We Go From Here?

Now that this link between homosexual priests and promiscuous homosexual activity has been established (science is real!), everyone in the church, from each one of us, to our clergy, to our bishops, all the way to the pope, is being forced to choose between the victim and the perpetrator, between justice and mercy, between abused teenage boys and homosexual priests.

So, we better stop pointing fingers, blaming and demanding, and we better remind ourselves that our clergy is 16 times less likely to abuse children than all of the rest of us. We better start putting our heads together to search for what will likely be uncomfortable and painful solutions. These solutions that will probably involve going back to the age-old church policy, which excludes homosexuals from ordination to the priesthood. Much as we recognize the value of all human beings, we must also recognize that not all of us are suited for every occupation on earth.

American progressives, who include some American Catholics, have pressured the Church to remove any stigma from homosexuality, and even to approve gay marriage. But when homosexuality becomes associated with sexual abuse of teenagers, or with an increased predilection towards pedophilia, how can we simultaneously pressure the Church to welcome homosexuals, yet eliminate ephebophilia at the same time?

Most people are afraid of even voicing these questions, lest their local ANTIFA throws bricks through their living room windows.
And our Pope, who seems to want to be a nice guy to everyone, is trapped by this dilemma, too.
It takes tremendous courage to step into the middle of this controversy, to take sides with abused children rather than with the hurt feelings of homosexuals, to seek investigation and documentation of the truth, regardless of what unpopular results we might face.

The Most Difficult Question

The last logical, yet very difficult and politically incorrect question to be asked will be the following– if indeed it is demonstrated that the homosexual subculture in the Church is associated with sexual abuse of teenagers, how does this apply to every other institution in our society where adults are in authority over teenagers — the schools, the scouts, sports coaches, and adoption institutions?

The Bigger Picture

One thing so often forgotten in all of these discussions is the bigger picture of sexual sin.
It is always easier to point fingers at another group than to acknowledge our own group’s sins.

Our society demands a certain degree of self restraint in a number of areas. These include eating, studying, working, refraining from stealing, refraining from “hate speech,” and many more.
Yet our modern society has pretty much abandoned the notion of sexual self restraint.

We are quite capable of such restraint. In fact, it would really improve our lives and would eliminate much misery, from the pain of divorce, to broken hearts, to STDs, to the culture of abortion, which kills about 1 million children every year in the United States. It would also reduce the shocking 28% of youth being sexually abused today.

When we as a society accept the degree of promiscuity that we now tolerate, how can we blame homosexuals for their lack of self-restraint?
If we followed (Judeo-Christian) Catholic teaching on the responsible use of our sexuality, and we educated and modeled modesty and sexual self control to our youth instead of using Planned Parenthood pamphlets to teach middle schoolers to be “Happy, Healthy and Hot,” the general atmosphere of civilized sexual behavior would reduce all scandals, which surfaced following the 1960’s “sexual revolution.”

No Witch Hunt, Please!

Homosexuals are not the only ones who need to exercise some self-restraint.
We all do.
We need to remove the log from our own eyes before we criticize the splinter in theirs.

We cannot go after homosexuals in a witch hunt, nor after Catholic priests in a witch hunt.

We should develop a bit more respect for the Catholic Church and her moral teachings, and return to Judeo-Christian values instead.

Next Time You See a Catholic Priest

Next time you see a Catholic priest, say to yourself-
“My children are over 20 times safer with him than they are with me and my spouse. Maybe I should be grateful to him for devoting his life to preserving the Wisdom passed down to us from Jesus Christ through the Catholic Church.”

Instead of bigoted attacks on the least offenders, remind yourself that anywhere you leave your child– school, daycare, sports, scouts, Olympics — there is always potential for sexual abuse. MORE potential than in the Catholic Church.

We cannot evaporate these people, we cannot keep them in jail for life, we cannot transport them to a fictional location like on Star Trek, and we have to deal with the existence of these people among us.

The Catholic Church is no different than the City of Madison, the State of Pennsylvania, or the United States.
Moreover, the Catholic Church does not operate any prisons, has no police force, Department of Justice, FBI, army, or any other mechanism to deal with offending priests other than reprimanding them or demoting them.

If we don’t attack the Mayor of Madison, the Governor of Pennsylvania, or the President of the United States for the 28% of our youth who are sexually abused, why is everyone so obsessed with going after the Catholic leadership?
The Church MUST be open and transparent, must prevent future abuse.
But the rest of society has to do the same, because this is a problem that requires action.

Masses of reparation are being held throughout the Diocese on September 14, the Feast of the Holy Cross. Bishop Morlino has also invited people to observe the Autumn Ember Days (September 19, 21, 22) “as days of fasting and abstinence in reparation for the sins and outrages committed by members of the clergy and episcopacy.

about Syte

Syte Reitz grew up in Queens, New York, in a family of Lithuanian immigrants who fled Nazi and Soviet domination during World War II. Her education includes a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, and post-doctoral work at Princeton University. Syte left her job as an Assistant Professor at Oakland University, Michigan, to devote herself to raising her children, and ultimately homeschooled them through the end of high school. She is a member of Madison's Cathedral Parish.